Know thine enemies

9.27.2016 Leave a comment

A part of Corey Robin’s reaction to the first Presidential debate:

What seems pretty clear, coming away from that debate, is that both parties are ideologically exhausted. Trump is replaying a script from the 1970s, and Clinton’s only answer is herself, that she clearly looks and acts more presidential. This could have been an election, and a debate, that covered new ground. It looks like, for better or for worse, we’ll be re-treading the same old, same old.

It is true that both parties have exhausted their respective ideologies. But their exhaustion appeared as such with the advent of neoliberalism, which dates to Jimmy Carter’s time in office. After all, the neoliberal ideology was and was meant to be a dead end solution to the human predicament. There would be no alternative to capitalist democracy, as per Margaret Thatcher and Francis Fukuyama. There could be only regressions and detours.

Unfortunately, or not, the proud ship of Whig history has sunk on a shoal complex composed of environmental degradation, resource depletion, an ossified capitalist world system and widespread spinelessness among the global political elite. Put differently, the ancestors of our dead enders began to destroy the world long before they took complete hold of it. The dead enders merely are the heirs of an embedded and remorseless Calvinism. But they were thoroughly unhinged by ‘their’ triumph over the residue of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and Russia. They believed their own propaganda had been confirmed! America’s duopoly system merely encapsulates the abyss which awaits us. Clinton and Trump — they are mere signs of our collective destruction. They reflect the stupidity and arrogance of the powerful. They reveal the consequences of our incapacity to learn.

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Green Capitalism

6.10.2014 Leave a comment

Is it an oxymoron or just a plain dumb idea? I believe we can easily guess Rob Urie’s answer to this question:

The bottom line is one of commensurability. Economic production that produces toxic externalities like global warming, dead oceans, undrinkable water, unbreathable air, etc, depends on assigning little or no value to these. To make this very clear, Western economic ‘accounting’ places no value on these, on the most fundamental necessities of living beings, by design. As Oscar Wilde put it, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is in fact a summation of Western economics; circumscription of the ‘knowable’ world by what has had a price tag put on it. The externalized costs of capitalist production are real— more real than the stuff in stores that is only ‘cheap’ because the true costs were lobbed off on people who haven’t yet fought back. To Mr. Krugman’s argument, even if technological innovation did reduce carbon emissions the people who would reap the benefits are not the same people who will pay the consequences— more carbon emissions is more even if the rate of growth is reduced.

Global warming is but shorthand for the increasingly conspicuous fact that the quest for ‘stuff’ has turned the entire planet into a noxious garbage dump. This concern might rightly be considered effete if ‘we,’ broadly considered, could exist in the garbage that some of us have created. But as global warming suggests, we can’t. The time for gimmicks, ‘technology,’ was a half century ago. And unless you missed this, the West is still plenty rich— rich in approximate proportion to the social and environmental catastrophes that capitalism has wrought. The question today is who pays, not what the costs are.

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